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I’ve just upgraded to the new 3.6 release of WordPress and switched to the new default Twenty Thirteen theme. What do you think? P.S. It’s an HTML5 theme (good for case studies if you’re teaching web applications) and it works great on an iPhone!

It’s summer. And of course the world believes that academics do nothing over the summer. Well, apart from the summer resit examinations that have to be set and marked, course preparation and undergraduate project allocation that has to be done, I’d agree there isn’t much to be done. But it is a period of the year for which there can be time which can be set aside for personal self-development projects.

On my list this year, I have

• Learn to touch type
• Become proficient in VIM
• Find a way to use mark-down on Blackboard

For the first of these, this web site looks useful. There are a couple of books and loads of video resources for the second. Suggestions welcomed for the third.

Just some notes on my first impressions. I’ve used iAnnotate a lot since I first wrote these notes, but reading back, my first impressions were pretty accurate.

• It can open documents from Dropbox (registered on iPad as a send target) and iAnnotate converts them to PDFs automatically.
• Fidelity of PDF conversion is not great (there’s an on-line service for this now). I’ve found that it’s best to save documents as PDF from desktop first.
• Good set of annotation tools (including voice). Uses more gestures than I’m used to. I Found the text annotation most useful (with a proper keyboard!)
• Syncs readily to iTunes Document Sharing, the provided free desktop client and Dropbox. After some usage, I found Dropbox to be the most convenient.
• Needs Adobe Acrobat Reader to access all annotation types. On Mac, built-in Preview shows notes, highlighting and scribbles but not audio. On windows, you’d be using Adobe Acrobat Reader anyway.
• Annotated PDFs can be uploaded to VLE (Blackboard at my institution) as attachments to feedback in grade centre.
• You still need to record marks on paper or perhaps in a spreadsheet (with documents to go offline) or with Google docs if you’re on line.
• There is a way to upload/download spreadsheets to Blackboard Gradecentre but it requires some preparation before hand (another article?).
• It’s more difficult to do marking with Blackboard rubric tool unless you had an off-line version of the rubric to use on the tablet. I suppose you could flip between iAnnotate and Safari.

It’s summer so there must be time to blog! Right?

Ignoring the fact that I failed to follow through on my last promise to do better, I’ve decided that after surviving another year of Interesting Times (See Alleged Mandarin Curse) there are a few “tales from the chalkface” that I could usefully recount. So watch this space!

I’ll also try to reboot by 366 Crispy Things blog to provide a daily serving of goodness.

I just noticed (because I haven’t used it seriously for a while) that Google Reader has gotten rid of the “star” which I used to use to share articles that I had read with my FriendFeed and my own Crispy Feeds feed. It’s been replaced by G+ and Share with Google+ buttons. I suppose it makes sense from Google’s point of view that the default way to share from its feed reader should be through it’s own social network, and to be fair, other sharing options are still available from Google Reader via the Send to option. But even so, now I have to find out how to add my G+ feed to my other aggregators … unless some kind soul can drop me a hint in the comments.

Stop Press¶

I just noticed that the star has not gone at all, it’s just fainter and to the left hand side. Still, let the post stand, this is after all a post, and posts have been few and far between of late, and the thing about identifying the feed for my G+ is still relevant.

With my daughter now staring her own blog, I feel guilty that my blog has been silent for so long. “I’ve been busy” is some kind of excuse, I suppose, but I know that I’ll be even busier next year. Perhaps I need some inspiration. Anyone got any ideas for me?

I’m registered to participate in BlendKit2012, the open, online course on blended learning. I thought you might be interested in joining me. If you haven’t heard about it already, it’s a five week opportunity to get ideas and develop materials for blended learning courses. There is no registration fee, and you can set your own goals for participation based on your existing time commitments.

For more information or to register, please visit: http://bit.ly/blendkit2012.

A series of talking heads discuss the move of the Bloomsbury Learning Environment to Moodle 2 from Blackboard 8. Videos provided on the ULCC Events Channel.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=videoseries?list=PL797550437607675C&hl=en_US]

Early on this term I decided that HTML5 had reached sufficient traction to make it worth changing the flavour of HTML to be covered in my two modules EG-146 and EG-259. Now it seems that the media is starting to support my decision. As reported in this week’s HTML5 Weekly (Issue #37 – May 9, 2012) the BBC had a Business News Report on the Rise of HTML5 and in the same issue, there’s a link to an article on why (newspaper and magazine) publishers don’t like apps which rather echoes my view expressed earlier this year. (Having tried and failed to tweet a link to that very article from the Google iPad App, my opinion has hardened.)

Postscript: EG-259 students should also checkout Polyfills for the Pragmatist.

• Guide to HTML5 Boilerplate for Rails Developers

This is a guide to HTML5 Boilerplate for Rails developers. Like Rails on the server side or “backend”, HTML5 Boilerplate provides structure and conventions for setting up HTML5, CSS3 styles, and Javascript for front-end development. It is a popular starting point for many front-end developers. However, some aspects of HTML5 Boilerplate are not useful for Rails projects. Sorting through the HTML5 Boilerplate documentation to find what’s useful for Rails can be confusing. This article lists each component of HTML5 Boilerplate and identifies its usefulness for Rails applications.

tags:tutorial railsapps html5 boilerplate html5 boilerplate web.development rails
- Rails Default Application Layout for HTML5

Rails Default Application Layout for HTML5. Shows how to set up a default application layout with navigation links, messages for alerts and notices, and CSS styling. Second in a series

tags:tutorial railsapps html5 boilerplate html5 boilerplate rails web.development
- Rails Tutorial for Devise with RSpec and Cucumber

First in a series

tags:tutorial railsapps web.development cucumber rspec devise

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.